2025-12-09 09:07:32
Maybe, if the country is lucky, the Supreme Court has decided to hear the case of Trump v. Barbara because it wants to reiterate something that the Constitution, federal law, and its own previous rulings have already clearly said, just more loudly, so that even the President can hear it: virtually all babies born in America are American citizens. The case is Donald Trump’s appeal of a lower-court ruling that threw out an executive order he issued in January, in which he declared that a large number of babies born here each year—estimates range to the hundreds of thousands—are not citizens. Why? Because he said so. When the Justices announced, on Friday, that they would hear him out, rather than simply turning the appeal down flat, they didn’t give an explanation. It takes four Justices out of the nine to grant cert (the technical term for taking a case), but their motives might be mixed. Some conservative Justices may want to let the President down easy, with a display of deference before ruling against him, and some liberals may want the opportunity to come down hard in defense of the babies. Maybe the Justices, who are not without vanity, just want to expound a bit. Perhaps they’ve already worked out some resounding phrases in their heads.
All those possibilities would be preferable to another one: that a critical mass of Justices has become convinced that there is a question about birthright citizenship, and that they are willing to upend our long-shared understanding of what it means to be born an American. With this Court, at this moment, it would be reckless to ignore that prospect. Ted Cruz and eight other Republican senators have submitted an amicus brief that largely supports Trump’s order; so have the attorneys general of twenty-four states. Even the more benign rationales for the Supreme Court taking the case carry with them the cost of leaving the impression that birthright citizenship is an unsettled matter. The wait for a ruling in Trump v. Barbara—which will likely come in June or July, after oral arguments this spring—will be one more destabilizing element in our already chaotic national scene.
Another case related to the executive order, Trump v. CASA, was decided by the Court in June, but that one did not address the substance of the order. Instead, it was about whether lower-court judges could use what are known as universal, or nationwide, injunctions to stop it from going into effect. The Court said that they could not. (Trump v. Barbara is a class-action suit, on behalf of babies born after the executive order; this, along with a case brought by Washington and other states, has allowed judges to put a hold on the order even without a universal injunction.) When CASA was argued, the executive order’s opponents suggested that the Administration might never appeal its various lower-court defeats, because it must know that it would lose—the order was so clearly unconstitutional. “If I were in your shoes, there is no way I’d approach the Supreme Court with this case,” Justice Elena Kagan said at the time to D. John Sauer, the Solicitor General, who argued that case for the Administration. But, when Justice Gorsuch asked Sauer if he would appeal if Trump lost in the lower courts, Sauer said, “Absolutely.” And he has. The question now is what, if anything, Trump thinks he can win.
The big prize for the White House, of course, would be an end to birthright citizenship, which many conservatives and opponents of immigration have come to deeply resent, with talk of “anchor babies” and demographic doom. Unfortunately for them, birthright citizenship is not some misty, novel concept or expansion of ill-defined rights. It is the hard promise, in plain language, of the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave citizenship to previously enslaved Black Americans but was recognized from the beginning as having a broader effect. The citizenship clause reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The opponents of birthright citizenship hang their arguments, such as they are, on the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” In 1898, which was only thirty years after the amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court ruled definitively on the meaning of that phrase in the case of Wong Kim Ark, a man born in California to Chinese immigrants who were precluded from becoming citizens by the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Court ruled that the only babies born in the U.S. but not “subject” to its jurisdiction in this sense were those born to “foreign sovereigns” or diplomats (for example, if a French ambassador happened to give birth in the U.S.); or those born on a foreign-government-owned ship within U.S. territorial borders; or those born to “enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory.” The “single additional exception,” the Court said, was the case of children born to certain Native American tribes, based on treaty relations that they then had with the federal government.
The Native American exception was, at the time, the most consequential, and had its own dark history. It was, however, for the most part done away with as a result of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. One fascinating aspect of Trump v. Barbara will be seeing what Justice Neil Gorsuch—a conservative who is also, somewhat idiosyncratically, an expert on and champion of tribal legal rights—makes of Wong Kim Ark’s legacy. In sum, Wong’s was a landmark case, not an obscure one, and the Court referred back to it in the decades that followed; its majority opinion in a 1957 case, for example, notes that a baby born to parents in the United States illegally “is, of course, an American citizen by birth.” Legislators shared that understanding of birthright citizenship when Congress incorporated the Fourteenth Amendment’s language into federal law, in 1940 and 1952.
Trump’s executive order represents a complete break with that history. It says that a baby is not a citizen if the mother has no legal status, or if her status is legal but only temporary (for example, if she is on a work or student visa), and if the father is not a citizen or legal permanent resident. Incredibly, the Administration, in its petition to the Supreme Court, argues not only that the order is legal but that the Court can uphold it without overruling the Wong Kim Ark precedent, which it claims has been “misread” for more than a hundred years.
In defense of this indefensible position, the Administration notes that Justice Horace Gray, who wrote the majority opinion in the case, mentioned a number of times that Wong Kim Ark’s parents were “resident” or “domiciled” in the United States. But, as the lawyers for the Barbara babies have argued, Gray went further, saying that anyone residing in the U.S. is clearly subject to its jurisdiction and, importantly, that those here just temporarily are subject to it, too. (Again, the narrow exceptions had to do with diplomats, invaders, and Native Americans.) If you are in the U.S. just temporarily, as a tourist or a student, say, you are still bound by American laws and the government’s authority.
Yet the Administration not only acts as if residency is a magic condition but offers a completely illogical and contradictory definition of what residency is. If parental residency is a requirement, then Trump’s lawyers are making a pretty good case for the citizenship of babies whose parents have lived established lives in this country for years or decades—whatever their legal status. But the Administration’s brief slips between the terms “resident” and “lawful permanent resident,” as if they meant the same thing. And if a parent acting unlawfully, perhaps by staying in the U.S. despite a deportation order, precludes a baby’s citizenship, why are the children of native-born criminals unquestionably citizens? (Actually, one might worry about how Trump would answer that question.)
For example, Sarah (as she is known in Court papers), a baby who is one of the parties in Trump v. Barbara, was born in Utah earlier this year to a mother from Taiwan who has lived in the United States for more than a decade and has a student visa. The idea that Sarah is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States is absurd on its face. Indeed, this Administration has argued that noncitizens are in some ways hyper-subject to its jurisdiction—that it has more of a right to monitor them and limit their freedoms than it does in the case of citizens.
Still, the focus on residency and legal status may point to a possible consolation prize for Trump in this litigation. He may not end birthright citizenship across the board, but perhaps he can turn the various, differently situated groups affected by his executive order against one another—with parents who are holders of H-1B visas arguing that they should not be grouped in with parents who have no legal status; people who arrived here as children saying that they are more clearly resident than students or people with temporary protected status; and everyone trying to avoid being connected to a country with a travel ban. There is enough division already without such quarrels.
At the same time, Trump’s executive order would affect everyone in America, not only immigrants. How is any baby supposed to prove the citizenship or legal status of its parents? In the months since the CASA decision, the Administration has put together some “guidance” to help answer that question; it’s an unhelpful mishmash of talk about hospitals collecting the parents’ Social Security numbers to check citizenship status (an imperfect system, particularly for green-card holders) when the babies are born and about the production of U.S. passports (which only about fifty per cent of Americans have). Ominously, there is a reference to resolving problems via a national 800 number that will connect parents to “updated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology to route them to a self-service option.”
Another possibility is that the Supreme Court could definitively throw out the executive order—but do so in a way that leaves room for Congress, though not the President, to redefine the meaning of the citizenship clause. Or the Court could chip away at the edges, perhaps with some ambiguous language deploring so-called “birth tourism.” At this rate, the Administration’s next move might be to try denying citizenship to babies born in neighborhoods that it says are under occupation by foreign gangs. That Trump was able to push the litigation as far as he has is, in itself, a victory for those who have long campaigned to undermine birthright citizenship. With Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court has made itself a part of the fight. The Justices will now have to either stand by the American babies whom Trump wants the country to disown, or join him in abandoning them. ♦
2025-12-09 09:07:32
On weekends we’d take the bus into the city—my father, my younger brother, and I. We lived in Brooklyn then, in Flatbush; this was in the late sixties, when I was nine or ten. My father didn’t live with us. He’d pick us up late morning on a Saturday, and off we’d head to Manhattan—three explorers in pursuit of discovery.
We had to change buses in Williamsburg. Handing our transfers to the driver of the second bus was like making it through passport control: nothing could stop us now.
And there was no stopping Manhattan once we got there. The speed of it! So many people, so many cars, and so much energy on those wide and sometimes narrow streets. In my memory of those trips, it’s always fall, and everyone is wearing a trenchcoat, just like Suzy Parker on Madison Avenue in “The Best of Everything.” My father, gone now for many years, was, in some ways, fearful of the world and bewildered by his boy children, but he was fearless when it came to showing us Manhattan. Yorkville, the Upper West Side, the Guggenheim, the New York Public Library—these were places we could and did visit, and they stayed with us forever. The only obstacle, at times, was the prejudice of others, which we didn’t allow to limit us or our dreams. Our father fed us the richness of culture by making it part of our everyday lives. Even now, I get rigid with anger and boredom when any voice of “authority” refers to art as one of life’s exceptions, not one of its rules.
The three of us didn’t spend much time in Harlem on those afternoons, and it’s not hard to deduce why: my father had an aversion to live entertainment—to “show biz”—and, for many people who didn’t live there, Harlem was the Apollo Theatre. Also, I think that my father, whose family was from Barbados, felt destabilized and unsettled in Harlem: he didn’t recognize himself in the Black American men in beautifully tailored suits, selling bean pies or books by Black authors or standing on street corners in a cloud of incense, or in the street preachers and Back-to-Africanists who contributed to the cacophony that greeted us the few times that we did get off the train at 125th Street. Were they like the Black Americans in Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, or Flatbush who made fun of him and his family’s Bajan ways? Where were his people, and where did he belong? Everywhere and nowhere.
I had to wait for the next generation—my older sister—to break through that uncertainty and introduce me to the political, social, and aesthetic significance of Harlem. In my sister’s company, I protested the construction of the State Office Building, at 125th and Seventh Avenue, in 1969, and I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem, which opened, on Fifth Avenue, in 1968, where I found ways of understanding what my father probably never understood, although he embodied it: the complications of being a wandering, dreaming, diasporic self.
Last summer, I was fortunate enough to be given a tour of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s new home by its director and chief curator, Thelma Golden, who, with the architecture firm Adjaye Associates, had been working to re-create and expand the museum for a long time. (The museum had been given a building, on West 125th Street, in 1979; that incarnation closed in 2018 and was demolished to make way for the current structure.) My impression of the new building was more spiritual than architectural: I was struck by how its design allows a perfect synthesis between the material and the immaterial—an unusual quality for a museum, given that part of its purpose is to acquire material, to build a unique collection that says as much about the institution’s interests as its exhibitions do. Then again, the Studio Museum in Harlem did not establish an official collecting policy until 1977, under the leadership of its fourth director, the scholar Mary Schmidt Campbell. (The museum has had seven directors since it was founded, with Golden serving the longest in the post; this year is her twentieth at the helm.)
When I was a kid, the sister who took me to the museum also took me to see Black-nationalist-inspired plays at places like the East, in Brooklyn, but I don’t remember coming across any forced ideological work at the Studio Museum in Harlem. (Don’t confuse ideology with politics—the Studio Museum has a history of political engagement that is integral to its DNA.) The museum’s primary mission then was to show living Black artists and connect them to the community, while also providing a space where they could work—hence the “studio” in the name. That ethos hasn’t changed, but the scale of the museum—from the extraordinary lobby, with its wide, welcoming entranceway and an adjacent seating area inspired by Harlem’s stoops, where so much life happens, to the verticality of the space as it goes up, up, up, taking your spirits with it—says something different now, not so much about ambition as about the realization of dreams. The museum is a manifestation of possibility, specifically possibility in Black lives that are not on a first-name basis with hope.
In recent decades, Harlem, through no fault of its own, has come to symbolize political and economic defeat—how Black lives don’t matter. Sometimes I feel that the general perception of the place is frozen in 1964, when Harlemites rioted for six days after a fifteen-year-old kid was shot by an off-duty police officer. The Harlem I knew when I was growing up evoked violence and nostalgia—the Cotton Club, Langston and Zora and Billie, “Get whitey” and all that—but was never realistically itself in the present time, an evolving community. The new Studio Museum roots Harlem in the present, without insisting on it, and in that way it tells a different tale: Harlem has a future, and the future is now.
During the tour, Golden showed me where the makers who had won a spot in the museum’s Artist-in-Residence program would have studio space. (Past recipients range from Kerry James Marshall and Leonardo Drew to Leslie Hewitt and Julie Mehretu. Malcolm Peacock, Zoë Pulley, and sonia louise davis make up the most recent class.) As Golden described some of the programs that were planned for the museum’s Education Workshop, which is dedicated to art-making activities for all ages, I was taken by her ability—and her willingness—to imagine the art and ideas that could be fostered here in her historic community. That’s an important part of the Studio Museum’s legacy, and Golden’s, too. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, before coming to the Studio Museum, she curated, among other shows, the first retrospective of the Black artist Bob Thompson, a brilliant painter who died of a heroin overdose in 1966, at the age of twenty-eight, and the landmark exhibition “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art,” which put the Black man, his body and his mind—as seen, heard, or experienced by artists ranging from David Hammons and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Leon Golub and Adrian Piper—front and center at a powerful New York institution where they rarely appeared at all. She brought that degree of assertiveness—and her desire to tie exhibitions to what she observes in the world—to the Studio Museum as well.
For the opening of the new building, Golden put together a sort of introductory wall of images, just off the lobby. The section is titled “From Now: A Collection in Context” and includes works I knew as a child, such as Tom Feelings’s wonderful black-and-white print “Untitled (Mother and Child),” from 1967. In the mosaic of figures and narratives which Golden assembled with a loving eye, I was jolted by the presence of several depictions of defiant queerness: Max Petrus’s 1976 color photograph of James Baldwin holding the hand of his mentor the artist Beauford Delaney, for one, and Texas Isaiah’s 2021 image “Ceremonies (Lullaby for My Insomniac),” which shows a beautiful brown trans person with pierced ears, sporting a string of pearls. It’s no secret—nor should it be—that Black nationalism, which has also been part of the fabric of Harlem, has rarely been, or made, a home for queerness. But here it was: Golden was saying, in an artful way, free of bombast, Queerness is part of who we are, our current revolution of being, so let’s look at it—together.
In 2017, Golden hired Connie H. Choi to be the Studio Museum’s associate curator. At Columbia University, where Choi earned her Ph.D., she studied with the art historian Kellie Jones, who has done an enormous amount to bring Black American art and aesthetics to the often segregated art world. For the museum’s reopening, Choi curated an exhibition of works by Tom Lloyd, who died in 1996; in a way, you could see the show (on view until March 22nd)—which includes ten of the artist’s lyrical and tender light-based abstract sculptures, as well as wall-mounted assemblages, works on paper, and assorted ephemera from the nineteen-sixties—as an act of excavation, but it is more of an act of illumination, both literally and figuratively. Choi has placed Lloyd’s work in a gallery that evokes a chapel, especially when filled with his celestial lights and geometric shapes. Lloyd, who collaborated with an engineer at the Radio Corporation of America, worked with what was then cutting-edge technology to program the lights in his pieces to create changing patterns.
Lloyd’s work was new to me, but it turns out that the artist, teacher, and activist, who was born in Detroit in 1929—his family moved to Brooklyn in the nineteen-thirties, and eventually to Queens, during the Great Migration—was the first person to show at the museum, in 1968. As I learned from Choi’s text in the catalogue, his abstract sculptures were criticized at the time for not being “Black” enough, which is to say not representational. This went straight to my heart, because to say that something is not Black enough is to silence all critical inquiry; ideological fury eliminates the possibility of thought. To insist on being represented in the work of others implies that you feel you haven’t been seen. But seen as what? And by whom? On those long walks through Manhattan with my father, I learned—or intuited—that you can exist as an image in the staring eyes of others, but that image may not match who you really are. Making art—even abstract art, which lacks the built-in sentiment of figurative imagery—is one way of expressing your individuality, and what parts of yourself you put into it is ultimately nobody’s business but your own. Lloyd’s pieces, which address light and form and the interplay between them, reveal far more about who he was than the conventional modes of “Black art” at the time would have.
Still, attacks on your “authenticity” are hard to take, especially if you’re an artist—what else do you have?—and I felt a kind of protective anger for Lloyd as I looked at such strong and beautiful pieces as “Moussakoo” (1968), a work in which four hexagonal shapes, each thirty-five by thirty-three by fifteen inches and filled with rows of bulbs, are placed together to make one transfixing polyhedron. The bulbs, which light up in various color patterns—red, orange, green, blue—show the artist’s interest in conveying the warmth and luminosity of the world. Standing in front of “Moussakoo,” I was reminded of the bright, happy feeling you get as Dorothy and her cohort run through a poppy field in “The Wizard of Oz.” That feeling changes when they fall asleep, and something like fear takes over. “Moussakoo” changes, too—darker, more mysterious color combinations flash—and your thoughts go somewhere else with it.
A smaller, no less elegant work, “Telaunt” (1965), is a double row of lights in a V shape that is turned on its side, like a less-than sign. Its sharp angles remind you that, when Lloyd was making these works, supergraphics were becoming common decorating tools in dorm rooms and banks across the country, and Lite-Brite—the toy, released in 1967, that allowed you to make your own marquee by punching translucent pegs into black paper with a light bulb beneath it—was enormously popular. In Lloyd’s pieces, I could sense again the wonderful playfulness of neon, the glamorous flashing colors of Times Square that I saw on those walks with my father, and the lights of the city’s great noisemakers, telegraphing danger or, for people of color, possible disaster: fire trucks, police cars, ambulances. Lloyd let New York into his work just as the Studio Museum lets Harlem in, and his pieces are lit as much by memory as by the light he created.
It’s clear that Frank Stella, too, was a major influence on Lloyd. In 1964, Stella began his “Notched-V” series—geometric works, made up of stripes painted on V-shaped canvases, that challenged the conventional view of how a painting could or should look. Away with those rectangles and squares (not to mention the squares who thought that painting had to be one thing and not another)! Let’s put some shape and color on those antiseptic gallery and museum walls! Lloyd’s lights are Stella’s stripes brought to life, moving beyond the canvas entirely. They push abstraction further, but they also serve to remind the viewer that you need light in order to see art in the first place.
By the early seventies, Lloyd had more or less stopped producing art, though his commitment to it remained ever present. In 1971, he opened the Store Front Museum, the first art museum in Queens, where he showed and supported Black artists. (The Store Front closed, in 1988, after relocating two years earlier.) But why did Lloyd stop making work? The question underlines the poignancy of the current show. Why artists stop creating is always a mystery. Why did Rimbaud stop writing poetry? Why did Nella Larsen stop writing stories? We puzzle over these self-imposed exiles, wondering if we are somehow to blame. Did we not love them enough? Praise them enough? I wonder how many of the makers Lloyd nurtured in those years in Queens knew of his younger self, the artist who created light, and who now, with Choi’s help, lives on in a Harlem version of Houston’s Rothko Chapel: meditative but alive, pulsing to the rhythm of modern times and the flashes and lulls of life on the avenue, uptown and down. ♦
2025-12-09 01:06:02
2025-12-09 01:06:01
Fourteen years ago, Emily Nussbaum, one of my esteemed predecessors in the TV-critic chair, notoriously titled her Top Ten list “I Hate Top Ten Lists.” I’ve seldom felt the same. I’m not much of a holiday person, but, for most of the time that I’ve been a working critic, I’ve loved the end-of-year ritual of sorting the so-so from the superb and the overhyped from the justly praised, pruning my favorites down to a most-deserving few. I’ve always taken seriously—probably too seriously—the privilege of giving hidden gems another chance to shine.
New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
But, in 2025, I can’t say that curating such a roundup was much fun. This year, as executives backed away from the kind of risky, ambitious programming that marked the last golden age of television, the industry’s decline was evident from its output. TV felt smaller. There were few epics like “The Last of Us” and “Alien: Earth,” which, while entertaining, were ultimately constrained by their source material. Several of the year’s most prominent prestige series—“Severance,” “Andor,” “Adolescence,” “The Bear,” “The White Lotus,” and “The Studio”—were, to my mind, ponderous, shallow, or both. I was especially disheartened by the dearth of straightforward sitcoms, as the comedy ecosystem continues to migrate online and becomes increasingly, sometimes incomprehensibly, niche.
In the past, keeping tabs on all the boundary-pushing shows could be a lonely affair; there were always series that I felt sure were only being watched by other TV critics. But, in such an uninspired year, I found my yardstick for what constitutes great television shifting. Though the traditional standards of excellence—innovation, ambition, execution, distinctiveness, and relevance—still apply, I was more inclined to highlight projects that I wanted to discuss (and debate) with other people. The water cooler may never be reinstalled, but these shows made me crave its return.
In 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau assassinated President James Garfield in a bid to be remembered in the history books; instead, he consigned both himself and his victim to the footnotes. This lively excavation of the entwined fates of Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen) and Garfield (Michael Shannon) makes for a twisty, political period drama, as well as a haunting parable for our violent times. The killer’s obsession with achieving glory isn’t the only element that feels startlingly modern, with anachronistic touches lending the series an unusual brio. A focus on Garfield’s sense of duty and grand agenda underscores what was lost with his death—and invites the question of what he might have achieved had he lived.
The “Real Housewives” franchise, which turned interpersonal conflict into an art form, is some two decades old, but the “S.L.C.” installment, now in its sixth season, feels as fresh as ever. This year’s episodes consistently deliver the best of the “Housewives” brand: moments of transcendent camp, viral one-liners, and the gaudiest fashion money can buy. But interwoven with the usual bickering and betrayals are the vulnerabilities that define this particular cast: struggles with addiction, religious (specifically Mormon) trauma, marriages involving profound disparities in age and wealth, and, of course, the perils of reality-TV fame.
Caleb Hearon’s quick wit and irreverent streak, demonstrated via front-facing-camera antics and a weekly podcast, “So True,” have already earned him a rabid online fan base—a group he’s characterized as “hundreds of thousands of mentally ill baristas.” His stellar first special, “Model Comedian,” introduces him to a mainstream audience. Hearon is thirty, gay, fat, and happy in a way that surprises even him; raised in a “redneck progressive” milieu in the Midwest, he also believes that “being attracted to men is a curse from the devil.” His jokes exhibit a writerly flair to rival that of John Mulaney, whether he’s reflecting on his father’s untimely death or affectionately lampooning the excesses of the queer community. Watching him weave effortlessly between the personal and the political feels like glimpsing the future of comedy.
For its first three seasons, “Hacks” was about chasing redemption: Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), a faded standup pioneer, wanted to prove herself worthy of new opportunities, while her protégée, Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), hoped to write her way back from cancellation. The dramedy’s fourth season brings Deborah and Ava from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, where they quickly discover that Hollywood itself is in such dire straits that it has only Potemkin success to offer. The new episodes are extra acidic, skewering the industry while illustrating how much easier female solidarity is to sell than to practice. But Deborah and Ava remain irresistible—and a supporting cast with prime roles for guest stars of a certain age, including Helen Hunt, Lauren Weedman, and Julianne Nicholson, prove that no other show sees more clearly the creative potential of older women.
In the first season of Jack Rooke’s semi-autobiographical, silly-sad dramedy, two depressed young men—one straight and eager to fit in, the other gay and nervous about exploring his sexuality—become college roommates, then fast friends. This year, the third and final season marks a self-assured farewell—one that tackles the male mental-health crisis with candor and tenderness. “Big Boys” is a series that always earns its (copious) tears, but it’s especially moving to see Rooke himself appear as an older version of his queer protagonist in the finale, declaring his intention not to “let the injustice of what could’ve been override all the joy of what was.”
In his much anticipated follow-up to “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” the TV auteur Vince Gilligan envisions an alien force that ends humanity as we know it—and arguably changes the world for the better. With its deliberate pacing and the built-in isolation of its heroine, Carol (played by the “Saul” alum Rhea Seehorn), one of a handful of people left intact by the extraterrestrial virus that takes over the planet, this unsettling thought experiment of a series can test a viewer’s patience, as it did mine. But, at a time when original ideas appear to be endangered in Hollywood, Gilligan has delivered a sci-fi tale that feels truly singular.
Ever since its début this summer, I’ve been trying to convince skeptical friends and acquaintances that Lena Dunham’s latest series—a loosely autobiographical romantic comedy about an unmoored New Yorker (played by Megan Stalter) who finds love after moving to London—is nothing short of remarkable. I’ll concede that the first three episodes are weaker, but, by the phenomenal fourth installment, the show’s ambitions reveal themselves. Dunham’s distinctive voice and satirical eye are in full force, but “Too Much” also taps into her heartfelt side—a combination that yields some of the year’s funniest scenes and best-written characters.
The alt-comedian Nathan Fielder’s reality series is the rare program that feels impossible to categorize: a ludicrously elaborate prank show that purports to help participants prepare for difficult conversations or decisions through dry runs with actors and hyper-realistic sets. In the second season, Fielder channels his HBO colleague John Oliver by taking on the deeply unsexy problem of aviation safety, which he claims might be improved through his carefully choreographed “rehearsals.” The result is digressive, elliptical, and occasionally absurd—and yet also genuinely revealing of the mental-health challenges facing pilots and the sometimes brutal social dynamics of the cockpit.
Paul Reubens, the actor who created and performed as the bow-tied, besuited clown Pee-wee Herman, wanted desperately to be famous but not known. Reubens, who remained in the closet for much of his life and died in 2023, makes for a cagey, ambivalent subject in Matt Wolf’s posthumous docuseries. The unseen Wolf is an open admirer and a frustrated collaborator, granting Reubens his artistic due while grappling with the decades-long aftereffects of the homophobic scandals that derailed his career. Despite Reubens’s reluctance to cede control of his image, Wolf delivers a deeply moving love letter that conveys both his subject’s eclectic vision and all that it cost him to pursue it.
In 2025, no other show felt as needed as “The Pitt,” a medical drama of hard-won warmth that stars Noah Wyle as an emergency-room doctor at an underfunded urban hospital. If that sounds a lot like “E.R.”—and, according to the estate of that earlier series’ creator, Michael Crichton, it does—“The Pitt” is the rare throwback done right. It’s a bastion of kindness in a year that’s felt astonishingly cruel, and a fantastic showcase for fresh faces, such as Taylor Dearden and Gerran Howell, in an industry that seems to have forgotten how to launch new stars. The dizzying pace and overlapping story lines add to the show’s real-time immersiveness. Since “E.R.” ’s heyday, television has advanced by rejecting convention, but there’s still juice left in the formula—at least when the squeeze is applied with such care. ♦
2025-12-08 19:06:03
The other day, while shopping for dried figs and pink, plum-soaked sesame seeds at the East Village spice store SOS Chefs, I asked the baker and cookbook author Bryan Ford where in the city he’d go for a baguette or a croissant. “I wouldn’t!” Ford, who is thirty-six, barrel-chested, and bearded, with a propensity for four-letter words, said, laughing. “That’s just not what I crave.” Born in the Bronx and raised in New Orleans, Ford specializes in breads that can be harder to find in New York: sourdough pan de coco (soft, sweet dinner rolls made with coconut milk, a staple in his parents’ native Honduras); conchas and other Mexican pan dulce; pan chapla, an anise-scented Peruvian loaf that is leavened with chicha de jora, a fermented corn beverage. I first met him in 2023, when he served me a phenomenal alfajor—a sandwich cookie made with shortbread and dulce de leche—at the Family Reunion, the chef Kwame Onwuachi’s annual food festival; for a while, he baked bread for Tatiana, Onwuachi’s acclaimed restaurant at Lincoln Center. Last year, Ford published “Pan y Dulce,” a follow-up to his first cookbook, “New World Sourdough” (2020). Both books are part of his mission to “decolonize the baking world,” as he sometimes puts it, by showcasing the breadth and complexity of Latin American and Caribbean baking.
Also last year, Ford and his wife, Bridget Kenna—whom he met when she produced his first TV show, “The Artisan’s Kitchen”—left New York for Florida. They were preparing for the arrival of their first child, and Ford had previously lived in Miami, where he baked at a beloved local shop called El Bagel and sold jalá (also known as challah) on the side. So I was surprised when Ford called, over the summer, to tell me that he and Kenna were returning to the city, and that he’d be opening a bakery in Brooklyn Heights. I was even more surprised when he told me that it would be an Afghan bakery, called Diljān.
New York is in a golden age of baked goods. A decade ago, it was a cliché for New Yorkers to visit Paris and come back yearning for that city’s corner boulangeries, which casually sold baguettes that were leagues beyond anything you’d find in the boroughs. Today, even if New York hasn’t matched Paris’s density of excellent options, it has seen a flourishing of superlative baking. In the early twenty-tens, Brooklyn bakeries such as She Wolf and Bien Cuit inaugurated a wave of prestige bread, proffering expertly crafted sourdough loaves. During the pandemic, a number of out-of-work professional bakers started selling bread and pastries out of their home kitchens; more than one eventually turned their quarantine hustle into a brick-and-mortar business. Now a town that used to apologize for its croissants boasts hours-long lines for them: both the West Village and Brooklyn Heights locations of L’Appartement 4F, a game-changing French bakery, are consistently mobbed with people seeking pâtisserie, baguettes, and fifty-dollar boxes of breakfast cereal made of tiny, hand-rolled croissants.
As the city’s bakeries have grown increasingly culturally specific, representing far-flung cuisines and styles—see Librae, in the East Village, which deploys Danish techniques and Middle Eastern ingredients like za’atar and black lime—they have also leaned into the culinary identity of New York. Radio Bakery, a spinoff of a Ridgewood restaurant called Rolo’s, sells bacon-egg-and-cheese focaccia by the slice; Elbow Bread, inspired by the Jewish history of the Lower East Side, offers a challah croissant and a buckwheat latte.
Perhaps none is as specific as Diljān. Ford’s partners in the business are Ali Zaman and Mohamed Ghiasi, a pair of Afghan American restaurateurs. Zaman, who is thirty, and Ghiasi, who is twenty-eight, went to the same high school in Queens, as did their fathers, who are veterans of the local restaurant industry. In 2021, the younger Zaman and Ghiasi opened Little Flower, a halal coffee shop in Astoria, which became a beloved haunt of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who also frequents Zaman’s father’s restaurant, Sami’s Kabab House. Ford, who lived in Astoria, was a regular at Little Flower, too, and Zaman and Ghiasi enlisted him to revamp the café’s pastry menu, devising items such as a jalapeño-cheddar tart with halal beef bacon. When the pair decided to open Diljān, where they planned to focus on naan-e panjayi—the chewy, yeasty Afghan flatbread that they’d grown up eating—Ford was their first call.
Diljān, on Hicks Street, is not far from the formidable queues of L’Appartement 4F, but it’s even closer to a stretch of Atlantic Avenue where Lebanese and Syrian immigrants flocked in the middle of the twentieth century, after the decline of Manhattan’s Little Syria. The street is dotted with time-tested Middle Eastern businesses, including the spare but inviting Yemen Café, with its steaming platters of slow-roasted lamb and self-serve dispenser of sweet milky tea, and the grocery store Sahadi’s, which still uses take-a-number deli tickets to fill orders for dried fruit and nuts by the pound.
Zaman and Ghiasi—a former theatre actor and a real-estate developer, respectively—have a talent for riffing on classic New York tropes. After Little Flower, they opened a halal fast-food counter called Blue Hour inside a gas station in Bushwick; the interior of Diljān, with its crimson tiles and stainless-steel counter, is meant to evoke both the Afghan flag and the sidewalk coffee carts that their fathers used to operate. “I think people just think Afghan food is, like, kabab, and it’s way more than that,” Zaman told me. Standing behind the counter, Ford handed me a slab of puffy, finger-pocked golden bread, its shiny surface flecked with sesame and nigella seeds, to be eaten with a pair of cream-cheese dips. One was speckled with chopped beef bacon and scallion. The other was blended with sour-cherry jam, inspired by a simple breakfast of Zaman and Ghiasi’s childhoods. (Their parents would substitute Philadelphia for the clotted cream they might have had in Afghanistan.)
In Afghan cuisine, naan-e panjayi is ubiquitous, as likely to appear in a breakfast spread as it is to be served with stews and roasts at dinner. Before signing on to Diljān, Ford had never made it. He started by researching what kind of wheat grows in Afghanistan. From American mills, Ford sourced flours stone-ground from varietals similar to those most commonly found in Afghanistan and began experimenting, vetting each iteration of the bread with Zaman, Ghiasi, and their families. Zaman and Ghiasi gave notes on how wheaty they wanted it to taste (very); Sami, Zaman’s father, would tell Ford if it was too thick or too salty. The rows of dimples, Ford told me, are supposed to be as straight as arrows. “I’m still working on that,” he added.
The dimples, and the bread’s oblong shape, give it a passing resemblance to focaccia, though Ford seemed to find the comparison reductive. “It might remind me of a focaccia because I learned how to make focaccia first, but that’s just part of the system we’re trying to break, right?” he said. “There are so many Italian and French bakeries because that’s the standard, but I think there should be more people being immersed in this kind of baking.” Ford hopes to distinguish Diljān by prioritizing tradition over hype. “We won’t be selling anything that we call a croissant,” he said, though he acknowledged that “any bakery that’s doing well” is selling pâtisserie. “People just love that shit,” he continued. “So what do we do? We use Afghan flavors. We didn’t want to do a pistachio-rose”—a Middle Eastern combination that has already become a cliché of trendy pastry. “It has to be deeper,” he said, assessing a tray of laminated confections. One, shaped in a more defined crescent than that of a typical croissant, curved like the emblem of the Ottoman Empire; Ford piped it full of the pale-yellow pastry cream that gave it its name, the Saffron Shah. From a small tray of sheer pira—Afghan milk fudge, made with cardamom and orange-blossom water—he used a cookie cutter to extract glossy circles to fit into a Danish-like pastry, between layers of a vanilla pastry cream and diplomat cream. The texture of the finished product was delightfully riotous, shards of crisp golden crumb collapsing into the pleasingly claggy fudge and luscious custard.
Using a smaller, circular version of the naan-e panjayi, Ford began to assemble a matryoshka doll of carbs, stuffing the bread with a Jamaican-style patty that was in turn stuffed with a spiced potato mixture typically found inside bolani (a deep-fried Afghan flatbread), plus spoonfuls of green chutney and white sauce. It was a clever homage to the iconic beef-patty-on-coco-bread sandwich, popular in the Caribbean neighborhoods of the North Bronx, and beloved by all three Diljān co-founders. “It’s a New York staple!” Ghiasi said proudly. Zaman observed that their partnership felt natural in part because Afghan cuisine is itself a fusion. “It’s the melting pot of Asia, Central Asia,” Zaman said. “We have all these different influences: India, China, the Soviet Union, Iran.” New York was an obvious counterpart. “My dad loves conchas. My dad fucking loves bagels,” Zaman said, recalling his father’s coffee-cart days. “He was selling bagels and cream cheese. Cinnamon-raisin was his shit.”
Zaman and Ghiasi have hopes of greatly expanding their business; talking to them reminded me of the short-lived HBO comedy “How to Make It in America,” about a pair of ballsy young guys hustling to break into the fashion industry. But their ambition is imbued with an endearing vulnerability. “A big thing that I always talk about, just in my own life, is being an Afghan New Yorker,” Zaman told me. “You’re a kid, 9/11 happens, and you’re both sides of your identity. I’m Afghan and now there’s war with Afghanistan, but I’m also a New Yorker, and this tragedy happened. Growing up, you feel a little embarrassed that you’re Muslim. And now, I keep joking, it’s Zohran’s New York, it’s cool to be Muslim again. It’s, like, the coolest thing.” ♦
